Climbing Wizard's Altar : Black Desert

I didn't have any plans for a post tonight but there's something about playing Black Desert that just makes me want to share. Not sure why that is.

It's likely I wouldn't have been playing Black Desert tonight at all if Landmark's big pre-launch update had gone better but between the server coming up and my patching the game the server had come down again so that was that plan scuppered.

BDO had a patch too. We're having an Easter event it seems. I didn't pay much attention to that. With just an hour or so in hand I thought I'd go take a look at the Wizard's Altar since it happens to be very close to my new home on Goat Mountain. I can see it from my front door.

There were two quests in my book for the Altar, both level 18 and at least one came from the pesky Black Spirit, which means it's part of what appears to be the main quest line. That makes me nervous.

I was expecting a big fight. I was also expecting to have a tough time of it. At this point anyone who's planning on doing the quest themselves might want to look away because this is something of a spoiler...

Okay...warning over...last chance to leave...

Twin Peaks : EQN Landmark

Alpha patching continues apace. A few days ago functionality was added to the Spires that allows you to see, with some expectation of accuracy, which island is home to your claim. Over the course of the week three new servers appeared, including two physically based in the EU, and a slew of new islands were added to the older Worlds, allowing everyone to spread out, relocate and find some idyllic spot of their very own to ruin beautify.

The new, much improved, map interface makes finding either your existing claim or a new spot to plant your flag very much more manageable.Skapusniak was right. My claim hadn't vanished after all - I was looking for it in the wrong place. I hiked out to reclaim it but after looking at all that flat sand I thought I'd take a chance and see if I couldn't find something with a little more potential. It was slightly nervously that I deleted the claim. There have been a few horror stories of people losing their flags but mine popped right into my bag.

My bag, by the way, is considerably more capacious than it should be. The Explorer's Pack comes with a "Mega Pocket" that rather disappointingly turns out to add just five slots but due to various bugs and wipes so far SOE have reissued all the freebies at least twice and apart from the extra Claim flags, which we aren't allowed to use on pain of demolition, we get to keep the extras. I ended up with six Mega Pockets making an additional thirty slots  to stuff with clutter valuable resources.

Not far from my original claim but conveniently closer to the Spires I came across an untenanted mountain. I say mountain. It's more of a butte, really. Maybe a hundred metres high with a flat top. I snapped it up.

Standing on the top of my mountain as the sun set I felt a deep proprietorial pride. And I hadn't even built anything yet. If nothing else at least finally I had somewhere to put that Saw Table I'd been lugging around.

The intricacies of how claims work remain opaque to me. Once claimed you see a large cubic area that represents the heart of your Claim and a lot of straight or curved lines that represent the boundaries. If, like me, you've claimed an elevated area you only have rights to that horizontal plane but not to the land beneath, which in my case is owned by someone else. That immediately gave me the idea of running a virtual protection racket. "That's a nice cottage you got there, mister. Gets the sun nicely in the evening, don't it? Be a shame if someone was to, I dunno, roof you in, wouldn't it?"

The more you think about it, the more of a potential customer service nightmare Landmark could be. When it was announced back last summer there were a lot of comments about the "Second Life" effect, where everything tends towards the priapic. Jogging back to the Spires to use the public Forge to make a forge of my own (so I don't have to jog to the Spires to use the forge, you see) I came across startling evidence of another problem in the making.

Before I ran into that little gem I passed a plot featuring a fifty-metre ankh. Swap that for a swastika and imagine the tickets. And then there are the gold farmers. Remember the days of body art in Everquest, when the plains of Antonica were littered with the corpses of level ones artfully arranged to spell out the urls of illegal RMT sites? Now imagine those people let loose with tools to reshape the world...

Thankfully those are problems for another day. For now I'm just happy to have my mountain. Wait! Make that mountains. Plural. The border of my claim stretches across the ravine to encompass a second peak to the north-west. My plan is to build a bridge between the two, just because I can.

Except I can't. After I finished some over-elaborate and unnecessary steps down to a large ledge at the edge of my claim I got straight onto the bridge building thing. I got it started alright but half way across it vanished beneath my feet and I fell to the canyon floor a hundred metres below. Lucky falling damage isn't in yet. I rebuilt it a couple of times but it won't stay built. I'm not sure yet if this is because of the bug that doesn't recognize which World my claim is in or because I'm not supposed to build outside of the core claim. I'm hoping it's the former because if not then these claims really aren't very roomy.

Never mind. There's plenty to be getting on with other than bridge-building. I made a Grappling Hook yesterday, which, as many have said before me, is ridiculously amusing. I spent a good while last night just playing Spider Man on various trees and overhangs. When that falling damage does come in this thing's going to be invaluable.

Then there's my Iron Pick to be made. I need that to mine Topaz. I need Topaz to make my Selection Tool. I need my Selection Tool to save Templates.  I need to be able to save Templates to protect my hard work from bugs, wipes and my own design inadequacies. The progression mechanic is beginning to flesh out in my mind a little now and it looks rather clever.

As I was digging my way out of a deep, vertical mineshaft I'd inadvertently trapped myself down last night it occurred to me that, for all the bugs and glitches and incomplete or absent features and systems, Alpha is probably going to be the easiest we ever have it in Landmark. As I mentioned, there's no falling damage yet but it goes further than that: your character can't take any kind of damage at all right now. The grappling hook is a great toy but you can run up an almost-vertical slope so you don't really need it. You need an awful lot of raw materials to make anything so there's a good deal of grind but everything is lying about on the surface in plain sight and there's nothing to stop you helping yourself.

By the time we get to closed beta we'll have falling damage, the ability to run up steep inclines will have been removed, higher tier resources will be hidden below ground and the world will be populated with aggressive creatures. At the moment everyone playing is treating the whole thing as a resource-gathering, structure-building toolset and most seem to like it that way. There could be quite a grinding of gears when an exploration and combat MMO gets overlaid on top of that.

So, make the most of the calm while it lasts. At the rate things are changing that might not be very long.

Edit and Addendum

It appears that I was being wildly over-optimistic about how much land I own. The white lines indicate the buffer area and I probably shouldn't even be able to see them. Anything built inside them but outside the main box doesn't persist. I only own one mountain after all.

Very First Impressions : Landmark

With the exquisite timing SOE have always been known for, no sooner did they lift the NDA than the servers fell over. It was gone two in the morning when I finished the previous post so I went to bed. This morning the servers are down again. Not sure if they've been down all night.

It at least gives me a chance to post some brief thoughts, based on my extensive and deep understanding of the game gleaned from almost two hours of aimlessly running about and occasionally digging holes.

• Appearances

It looks pretty enough but I wouldn't go overboard about either the art design or the aesthetics just yet. Keen complains that the colors look washed out. They are certainly not as vibrant as, say, GW2 or Firefall but they seem quite rich to me.

• The World

The environments are reasonably convincing. There are no zones as such (although the islands are completely separate, which is much the same thing) and the transitions from one type of terrain to another aren't too jarring. It's far from naturalistic though.

• Lore

Don't think there is any. I can already see that, as I expected, I am going to have a problem with context. The world has no indigenous sentient race so there is no pre-existing built environment, no culture, no history. Although, come to think of it, just where did that Combine Spire come from, eh?

The pristine, natural world will very quickly be built over by up to 10,000 players per server. Unless and until players have the ability to place NPCs and set their AI, I can't see that there will be any context. Until then the whole place is going to look like the end-of-year show at architecture school.

• Beauty and Deportment

The character models are much better than I was expecting. I generally don't like playing humans, which is currently the only choice, but I found I could connect with my character quite easily. Movement is nice and fluid. Sliding down hills is fun. They really should get climbing trees in somehow.

• Mining

Mining is ridiculously enjoyable. The way the tunnels develop is extremely satisfying, as are the raws and rares that pop up while you dig. Standing inside a deep hole you've dug and looking up at the moon overhead is disturbingly entertaining. Even so, digging holes would be about a million times more enjoyable if I was a ratonga. Just sayin'.

• Logging

Chopping down trees, by contrast, is completely pedestrian and dull. Whack, whack, whack, flurry of woodchips, progress bar winds down, tree vanishes. Also you can't hack into a cactus or forage from a bush. Yet. I am guessing that will come because for now cotton, jute and all kinds of inappropriate raws come flying out of the trees.

• Playability

A lot of people are saying things like  "This alpha really is an alpha". Is it? The few alphas I've played before this were considerably less, well, playable than this. Yes it's buggy, but betas used to be buggy, it was what you expected. In terms of playability I'd put Landmark Alpha on a par with my experiences in EQ2 during mid beta (and much better than late beta, when they broke everything that used to work) or Horizons late beta (when the systems worked but most of the world was empty still). I've played MMOs that launched buggier and less feature-complete than this, but maybe I just have very low expectations.

• Claims

The whole Claim mechanic needs a rethink. Not just because the claim UI is dreadful, which it is and which SOE have acknowledged it is, but because it makes no sense. I can understand having a competitive element for claiming the "best" spots but at the moment the competition is to grab any spot. The game should begin by placing you on a default plot, a home base where you can begin to learn and practice with the tools. Once you've got the hang of those and the desire to build something more ambitious, then you should set out to explore the world and stake a claim. I foresee many five  minute uninstalls at launch if they make you go miles and miles to find an out-of-the way spot no-one else wanted before you can start doing what you thought you were going to be doing as soon as you logged in. I know Wurm Online works that way but WO is a tiny, niche game for a reason.

• Crafting

Haven't tried crafting yet. Apparently it requires a prodigious quantity of raws and crafting your own tools is the progression mechanic for the whole game. Can't see that working long-term. I'm guessing we will eventually get a full range of crafts and recipes to go with them and that will be the real progression. The economy will thrive if required raw material quantities are vast, too. Quite looking forward to that stage. I fancy being the guy out in the wilds with the axe and the skinning knife, getting rich selling to all the crafters grinding away at their stations.

That's about it for now. Servers still down. I hope they're adding something good.

Landmark: Saga of Heroes : EQN Landmark

Reaction in my Feedly stream to the recent splurge of information on Landmark, has been distinctly and surprisingly sparse. Indeed, other than Keen's post-of-record and my own linking squib I don't think I saw anything. Even Keen's detailed report didn't generate much comment.

Maybe other people didn't glean as much from it but for me the Livestream finally answered some of my most pressing questions, particularly concerning the importance and significance of Claims. When I gave Mrs Bhagpuss a brief summary of how it's going to work she said "Oh, like Vanguard then!" and that sums it up perfectly.

The similarities are quite striking.

Location, Location, Location

Are you sure that goblin was a qualified architect?

In Vanguard, all houses stand in the open world. You can't build just anywhere, there are defined housing areas, but there's no instancing. When Vanguard was very busy (Trust me, for a while it really was) competition for the best plots was intense. Certain housing locations were highly desired, either because of the facilities, which varied considerably from area to area, or because of the proximity to popular adventuring haunts.

Some individual plots were especially coveted for aesthetic reasons. There was a single plot on a small island (from memory it was just off the Dornal Coast in Qalia) we envied so much that every time we sailed past it on our sloops we'd throw stones at the house someone had built there.

I said you were cutting those beams too long but would you listen?

We spent hours exploring Thestra and Qalia for the ideal plot. My first house was in a windswept, isolated cove near Konarthi Point in Thestra. I was very happy there at first but after a while the solitude and the rain began feel oppressive and the sheer distance from anything and anywhere began to wear me down so I sold up and moved to the sunswept sands of Abella Cove on Qalia. Mrs Bhagpuss had already claimed a plot on the beach and it was a nervous Raki who dismantled his Thestran cottage, sold the bricks and traveled halfway across the world hoping all the plots hadn't gone.

Having seen the Livestream I now understand that staking a claim in Landmark is like that. It's no longer some nebulous, hazy concept but a straightforward, very comprehensible and practical proposition. Yes, the world of Landmark will be vast at the start and infinitely expandable. Yes, everyone will be able to claim somewhere to build. If you want the right place, though, the perfect place, then you'll have to explore and you'll have to compete.

All Fall Down
In Vanguard you own your house but you don't own the land on which it stands. You pay a weekly upkeep fee for the plot and if that lapses your house falls down.

Alright, it doesn't actually fall down. It disappears and the plot becomes available for anyone else to snap up and build on. You don't lose anything other than the right to that spot. Everything from the bricks in the wall and the tiles on the roof to the furniture, fixtures and fittings inside automagically flit away to Escrow, a form of storage accessible to any character on your account from any of the many escrow merchants who hang around housing areas all over Telon.

Wherever I lay my cheese, that's my home.

If you stop playing for a while and let your house fall down, all you need to do when you return is scout out a new plot (or reclaim your old one if it turns out that you were the only one who'd live there on a bet after all), pay the purchase fee, take your stuff out of escrow and rebuild.

Landmark works in a very similar similar way. There will be upkeep on your Claim. If you fail to meet the payments for whatever reason everything you've built will vanish and the spot will be free to be claimed by anyone who takes a fancy to it. All the materials you used to build it, however, and everything you had in and on it, will be retained for future use. Moreover, you'll also have the Template for the structural design safely saved away, meaning you can rebuild with ease, just as soon as you find another Claim to your liking.

Expand That Chest

My next chest's going to be this big!

In Vanguard one of the pragmatic reasons for owning a house is storage. Depending on the size of the house you can place a number of chests ranging from a couple in the smallest dwelling up to a dozen in the largest of guild halls. Chests are independent of the global storage system, so if you need something from one of your chests you have to go back to your house to get it.


For a while back when I was playing Vanguard regularly, acquiring and stocking chests in my house was a significant goal. Even with three continental banks and a generous amount of on-character storage I still never felt I had enough chest space. Now there's a surprise.

Landmark has a system of personal storage using upgradeable chests placed at your claim that sounds very similar indeed.  Vanguard also had an undocumented storage option: you could place literally any item in your inventory in your house and it would leave your packs and become a visible object in your home. If there was a graphic available you would see that. Otherwise it would display as a small, wooden goblet. It would be nice if Landmark works that way, too, although preferably minus the goblets.

Moving on... apart from the reassuring and welcome familiarity provided by the line of descent from Vanguard some other very welcome news came our way both in and out of the Livestream.



Beware Of The Flowers

Hey, I can chop this guy down to size, right, so I'm going worry about some overgrown daffodil?

The world itself, or at least the few snippets we have so far seen, looks delightful but an aesthetically satisfying surface, while vital for gaining attention, generally won't be sufficient in itself to hold interest indefinitely. My concern with procedural landscapes in principal is that by definition they lack any context that would make them worth exploring. Like a fireworks display, you can only ooh and aah at a beautiful view for so long before the experience becomes enervating.

I feel considerably re-assured that lack of meaningful context won't be any more of a problem in Landmark than it is in most other MMOs. I anticipate owning a sense of purpose as I explore, and also having to keep my wits about me.

The brief discussion on "hazards" and particularly the cameo appearance of The Chomper did a lot to convince me that there will be plenty to occupy those of us who aren't bursting with architectural fantasies just crying out to be realized, as did clarification of the need to explore, gather and discover before you can build.

I can now imagine making a role for myself as the supplier rather than the designer in this creative ecosystem, the trapper and hunter ranging deep into the forests in search of exotic pelts or the botanic explorer mounting specimen-gathering expeditions in a world where the flowers really are out to get you.  Yeah.

You Sure That's Real Money ?
There was financial news too. Firstly Dave "Smokejumper" Georgeson popped up to quell a growing insurrectionist rumor that upkeep would require real money payments via Station Cash.

His reply that "Some things have an SC *option* but currently there's nothing that is SC *only* except Player Studio items" does feature the ever-popular get-out clause "currently" but I think that's just standard self-protection. I'm happy to take it that Landmark will be Pay To Skip not Pay To Play.

Better yet came the confirmation that Player Studio will be rolled out to European players. Smed's twitter comment was definite if limited: "...on EU Player Studio – we had to figure out the relevant tax forms and legal regulations. This has never been about anything other than annoying taxation and legal things we had to get buttoned up.". Whether that really means "EU" or whether it includes the non-EU states bundled up in the PSS1 deal I guess we have to wait and see, as indeed will the rest of the world.

With the whole ethos of both Landmark and EQNext predicated on Player Studio, universal access will have to be made to happen somehow or the games just aren't going to be viable for whoever gets left out. Not, at least, if haves and have-nots are all playing together on the same servers. This is a step in the right direction although how far down that road we will be by the time Landmark goes live is anyone's guess.


And Finally

Happiness is a flat roof and no more plots between you and the horizon.

Terry Michaels, Senior Producer on Landmark, rolled out a short video . Mostly he summarizes things announced and discussed at greater length elsewhere but towards the end he mentions a forthcoming Dev Diary on crafting. With luck that should fit enough pieces into the jigsaw so we should at least have the frame finished even if we can't yet see the completed picture.

One Trailblazer and one Explorer pack purchased. Roll on Alpha.

[Sorry if anyone's seeing what look like half-finished versions of this post that keep changing. Blogger's Preview function has been broken for me for a while now and I'm reduced to live editing for the final cut. Finished now. I think...]

Warning! Claimjumpers Will Be Chomped! : EQN Landmark

Yesterday's SOE Livestream finally gave us some real hard details about what Landmark is going to be. I was wondering how I'd find the time to write it all up but then I saw Keen's excellent round-up so now I don't have to. I'll just link to that.

Still so many questions to ask but at least now I feel I'm on some kind of firm ground.

All Mod Cons : EQNext, Landmark

One of the myriad polls running on EQNext's Round Table.

So far only 8% of respondents have stepped up to man the barricades with :

"Third-party mods should not be allowed at all by SOE".

It's an answer that tempted me at first but in the end I went for :

"I want to have customization options in the SOE UI, but I don’t usually use third party creations."

It's a less confrontational option, for sure, but it's one that might almost be considered antisocial. You could read it as a plea for fairness and an even playing field, but equally it might be taken as "You lot do what you want; just stay out of my way and don't ask me to join in". Well, there was a bit of that in my thinking as I voted, I won't deny it, but a healthy skepticism towards allowing user-made modifications in a shared, communal environment also seems like a socially-conscious attitude to take.

Whether approaching the metaspace of MMORPGs from the perspective of game design or virtual world building a certain consistency of experience would seem to be essential if the enterprise is to succeed. There's already a very wide range of unavoidable variations in what players see, hear and are able to react to as dictated by their choice of hardware and the quality of their internet connections. To allow a plethora of modifications to unsettle the foundations of the shared environment still further seems to risk knocking down the whole precarious house of cards.

How about a mod that tells people what you're really thinking?

The hoariest and thorniest issue in MMO design must surely be "balance". Can there be any MMO ever launched that didn't almost immediately find itself locked in a never-ending round of table-leg trimming? Sawing an inch off here, sliding a book under there in an increasingly desperate effort to get the thing to stand four-square. If developers find it all but impossible to balance the classes and abilities they themselves have made, how then are they ever going to achieve the stability and fairness they desire when any player could be utilizing dozens of third-party add-ons and mods or none?

The obvious riposte would be that the world's most successful MMO seems to manage so it can't be impossible. I played WoW for about four months. It's a good MMO and I enjoyed it. As far as I recall, I downloaded two mods. One blocked all duel messages and I forget what the other did but it was something similar. While I was playing I read about plenty of supposedly essential mods, the ones that run your healing for you or track nodes for harvesting or monitor the auction house and buy and sell at peak. I decided I could probably manage without them, carried on doing all those things for myself and it seemed to go alright.

Of course, I was mostly soloing or duoing with Mrs Bhagpuss, who wasn't using any mods either, and even back then four or five years ago, while leveling up might not have been the complete cakewalk it supposedly is now, the kind of content we were doing couldn't be described as particularly challenging. It would have been a lot different even had we attempted to play extensively in pick-up groups as we once did in Everquest I'm sure. When the Dungeon Finder came in, just as I was leaving, I healed a few low-level dungeons and got away with it but I don't imagine that would have remained a tenable position for long. Had we wanted to progress further and be accepted as group players I imagine we'd have had to get at least a few of the most expected mods.

Okay, so maybe that's not such a great idea...

It seems all but inevitable that as third-party mods become prevalent in an MMO two things have to happen: developers must take account of the most popular ones when designing and tuning content and players must adopt them if they have any interest in what might be called "competitive" play. Yes, if you choose to ignore the modding scene you can trundle happily along, soloing and playing with people you know, enjoying content that's meant to be taken lightly, but if you want to step up, if we can call it that, and play with strangers who will rightly expect you to play at their level of competence, well you're either going to need to be a lot better than they are or you're going to swallow your pride and your idealism and use the same autonomic assistants they do.

So on balance I'm wary of mods. They represent a potential arms-race both between player and developer in the eternal struggle to either trivialize or balance content and between player and player in the equally endless conflict of interest between the dedicated and the dilettante. Being wary, however, does not mean being completely close-minded.

Long before WoW set the agenda I used a few mods on and off back in Everquest. Some of them I'm using still, like Mapfiend (and its successor EQ2Map come to that). I also still prefer the modded xp bar in EQ that lets you see your xp in detail. For a long time I used a mod that allowed you to set set off an audio alarm triggered by a given phrase. Among other things I had it set to ring a bell when invisibility began to fade. Saved my life so many times.

A mod that would allow screenshots with speech-bubbles but no other UI elements, now that I'd use.

Audio triggers like that are desperately underused in MMOs, which is a whole topic in itself, and it's not just triggers; the entire soundscape of MMOs remains hugely underexploited by both developers and modders alike. The first mod I ever downloaded for any game was a voice pack for Baldur's Gate that converted all my character's voice files into sound samples taken from Daria. We could do with a lot more of that. It would enhance the GW2 experience no end...well it would mine...

The Round Table polls are aimed mainly at EQNext, which is, we suppose at least, primarily a gameplay-oriented experience. Whatever the result of the poll, for the game to work as a game, SOE will have to exercise a considerable degree of quality control over the mods they choose to allow. Landmark, on the other hand, is supposedly a utility or a tool-kit designed to appeal to the creativity and imagination of its users, which would seem to make it the ideal testbed and home for would-be modders.

Perhaps that will be the through-route for approved mods to arrive in EQNext. If so, why wouldn't their creators be rewarded in the same way, financially, as the creators and designers of buildings and items, through Player Studio?

And there's another giant can of worms just waiting to be opened right there. I wonder, when they were searching around for a final name for the project codenamed EQNext, d'you think anyone suggested Everquest: The Box of Pandora?

Oops, They Did It Again: SOE, EQ2

Using the now-traditional method, a chaotic flurry of disorganized semi-reveals, mollifying forum posts, half-baked statements of intent, tweets and Reddit convos, Sony Online Entertainment, the company that likes to say "Yes! No! Wait...maybe...we're not sure...", announced...something.

Wilhelm has an excellent account of the shenanigans, including links to Sheldon's usual first-rate news coverage at EQ2Wire, so I won't go over the details here. Go read those if you need to get up to speed.

I just wanted to make a couple of quick observations from a UK perspective.

Smed briefly addresses the PSS1 elephant in the room, albeit rather pointedly not by name:

"European players – we have an idea on how to include you in this but we need to discuss with our partners.We have a pretty good idea on this though. give us a bit of time to suss this out."

 Really? I should damn well hope you do have "a pretty good idea". I'd hate to think that you were planning on offering the rest of the world unfettered access to all SOE games for a single monthly charge of $14.99 while leaving the poor relations over here in the myriad countries enmeshed in the PSS1 web to pay separate, individual subscriptions to each game.

Because, and please correct me if I'm wrong, PSS1 has no equivalent of the All Access pass. That was one of the reasons that, while SOE stopped accepting new AA Subs from PSS1 territories long ago, existing Access subscribers have been allowed to retain their accounts and pay SOE for them directly.

Then there's Landmark. The only SOE game specifically excluded from the PSS1 deal. A free-to-play title for which I am about to pay a hundred dollars to alpha test. And EQNext, which, whenever it finally arrives, will be played on SOE servers in America but for which access in PSS1 territories will be through their portal exclusively.

A mess is what that is.

Whatever the upshot, it's going to save me money. If I keep grandfather rights to the new deal I'll be paying $14.99 a month instead of $19.99 and I'll save $5.00. If it's deemed that Access no longer exists and those rights no longer pertain then I'll be playing my SOE games for free and I'll save even more!

The way SOE do these things I'm resigned to watching it play out like a slow-motion train wreck over the next few weeks but nevertheless I'm optimistic. They have the most appalling habit of making everything absolutely as difficult as possible for both themselves and their customers along the way but by and large they do tend to wind up in roughly the right place in the end.

If only they'd learn something in the process once in a while.

No, that'd be asking too much.

A Landmark Decision : EQN Landmark

Ever since Sony Online Entertaiment CEO John "Smed" Smedley twittered his new estimate of the start date for Landmark's buy-in alpha this fence I've been perching on has been getting more and more uncomfortable. With a potential door-opening just a couple of weeks away the time for thoughtful, measured consideration is coming to an end. In the immortal words of Secret Affair it's time for action.

So I asked Mrs Bhagpuss what to do.

She said "Get it for me for my birthday", which kind of answers half the question. Maybe a quarter. Get what, exactly?

Dismissing the beta-only Settler Pack, the choice is between the $59.99 Explorer or the $99.99 Trailblazer. I took a while to read the full contents list for both. Carefully. That didn't help much. Without knowing a lot more about the game itself it's virtually impossible to estimate the value of any of the goods and services that go with it.

Any value the the cosmetic gear might have is entirely subjective anyway. I wouldn't pay fifty cents for all of it put together but someone else might get hours of pleasure from watching their avatar prancing around dressed like the mascot of the Freedonia Marching Band. Same goes for the titles.

The items included in each pack at least have a practical purpose. Having a single, unbreakable tool that acts both as an axe and a pick is nothing to be sniffed at in a virtual world where, we suppose, chopping down trees and digging up ore will make up a great deal of the gameplay. Anything that gives a boost to gathering and crafting or increases your storage capacity would come in welcome in any MMO.

These are unarguably items of value and no doubt something very similar will be on sale in the Station Cash Shop once the game hits Open Beta, if not before. That knowledge doesn't help much in fixing a monetary value, however, if you neither know the price point for the items nor whether such existing Station Cash as you might own will carry over to the Landmark store.

That just leaves access and ownership. No point pretending otherwise; that's what's really on sale here.

There's no release date for Landmark. Wilhelm recently prognosticated a mid-October launch, which might be on the nose for the official release. The FAQ has no truck with any dates beyond the start of closed beta "on or before March 31". I'd guess Open Beta will come in the early/mid summer and for all intents and purposes Open Beta will be launch.

The FAQ is worth reading in detail. It answers a few important questions regarding progress. Effectively you get to keep any and all design work you do right from the start of Alpha and just about everything else, including all character progression, becomes permanent from the beginning of Closed Beta. Because you can, if you wish, keep playing the same character throughout, including through any wipes, by buying one of the Alpha access packs you are effectively paying to start playing the actual game, albeit in an unfinished format, several months before it becomes publicly available.

The only thing you don't get to keep is the location in the world where you set up home - your "Claim". Again we run into the buffers of ignorance. How important is your Claim? Does it really matter where you build, especially given that you came out of Closed Beta with your forty-room Winter Palace and Boating Lake safely templated and saved? Are you reliant on running hell-for-leather back to the exact spot where you created it or could you just flatten any old bit of land and slap it down wherever? We just don't know, so the value of those two or more days Head Start that come only with the most expensive pack is hard, maybe impossible, to judge.

Thinking too much on all this could send a person over the edge. Decisions have to be made and fortunately one is easy: I will be buying the Trailblazer Pack for Mrs Bhagpuss as a birthday present. For myself I'm minded to buy the Explorer Pack to see how things go in Alpha. Once I know more about it from the inside, if that Head Start begins to look crucial I can always upgrade before the time comes.

Or I may just go for the Trailblazer and be done with it. No, I don't think it's worth a hundred dollars (and we'll likely have to pay VAT on top of that here in the UK so make that $120). It will be the most expensive MMO I've ever bought and I don't even know what I'm buying. Call that half a decision made, then. Or is it three-quarters?

Whichever version I end up with, sadly an NDA is likely to be in place throughout Alpha and well into Closed Beta so my plan to report here on what Landmark turns out to be will just have to wait. Then again, it's supposed to be a game that's all about creativity, isn't it?

Maybe we'll get to find out just how creative I can be.

2013 in Review: 2014 in Prospect

Meet the new year, same as the old year, as Pete Townshend might have said. New Year's never been much of a thing round our house. Seasons change and so does the weather but resolutions and predictions don't figure much. Still and all it's as good a time to reflect as any and it's always fun to speculate, so away we go.

As many have observed already, 2013 was something of a mark-time year for MMOs. The biggest event of the year was either Neverwinter or the re-launch of FFXIV. When the best the genre has to offer is a choice between the latest project on the Perfect World/Cryptic assembly line and the second coming of a game that failed hard the first time round it would be tough to claim we'd had a vintage year.

That said, a lot of people seemed rather to enjoy Neverwinter although they often seemed to be admitting to something of a guilty pleasure whereas FFXIV: A Realm Reborn, to give it its full, unwieldy title, generally received the warm, if bemused, reception accorded to an old dog as it unexpectedly manages to learn a new trick. That the FFXIV revival was done so well did surprise people but nowhere near so much as that it was done at all.

For me, Neverwinter turned out to be one of those games that I like in theory but never get around to playing very much and now that it's decided not to run at all on my PC even the theory part is, well, theoretical. FFXIV I liked a lot and played a lot, for a while, but the combination of extreme alt-unfriendliness and subscription payment model did for any plans I might have entertained for playing it long-term.

The biggest new story of the year, in my opinion at least, was the combined EQNext/Landmark reveal at last summer's SOE Live. For a couple of weeks that seemed to be just about all anyone was talking about. More surprisingly Sony just about managed to keep the buzz going for rest of the year with a seemingly inexhaustible series of pointless polls and uncomfortable videos.

As I explained, while I think I'm relatively clear on what to expect from EQNext (nothing this year for a start) but I'm still not much wiser as to what Landmark actually is. The time is fast approaching when all will be revealed. According to Smed alpha should start sometime in January. Will I be there? The Magic 8-Ball knows.

Other than that, 2013 was all about GW2. It's an odd game. In some ways it turned out to be nothing like most people expected or ArenaNet claimed. With amazing sleight-of-hand ANet contrived to replace the usual vertical end-game gear grind progression with a similarly exhausting version based on crafting, while at the same time converting the hitherto sprawling, cyclical, unruly open world into a tidy, manageable sequence of numbered and packaged limited-duration events. The promised flat leveling and horizontal progression elements still exist but have deftly been rendered almost entirely irrelevant. A remarkable achievement.

While the entire game was being re-purposed around us, however, one of the original articles of faith at which many, myself included, had scoffed turned out to be no more than simple truth. It had been claimed before launch that World vs World vs World would provide all the endgame that was needed and after a coughing, stuttering start so it proved. The part of the game I never expected to pay any mind to has become, over these last few months, almost the entirety of my concern. I'm not saying I like that. Indeed I may be saying I don't like it much at all. But it's a fact.

Of course there were other MMOs, foremost among them EQ2, with whose expansion before last I finally caught up and whose current expansion I am just about ready to begin to explore. Then there was City of Steam, which came badly off the rails before righting itself after a fashion and carrying on along a new track altogether. I rode herd on dinosaurs in DinoStorm, jetpacked around Firefall, snuck back into The Secret World and even revisited World of Warcraft. I thought, often, about Getting Something Done in Everquest and Vanguard but rarely did.

And so it goes. 2013, the Year of More Of The Same. A comfortable year. Not much got done but by and large I had fun not doing it. What about 2014? Are we stuck in this cosy little rut for another twelvemonth? You know, I rather fear we may be.

The prospects for 2014 look uninspiring. I imagine the Big Three on the watch list of most Western MMO fans would be WildStar, TESO and EQLandmark.

Landmark I've already mentioned. To elaborate and prognosticate, I think it will confuse and disappoint in equal measure. Half the potential audience will be wishing they were playing EQNext and lobbying hard for Landmark to be a Full Feature MMO while the rest will just want to be left alone with a toolset to make their own worlds. I predict the two demographics will not play happily together and few will feel satisfied. On the other hand, I could be the blind man at the back of the elephant telling his friends he's found a piece of old rope...

TESO, on the other hand, looks set to disappoint just about everyone. I don't have any residual affection for the IP so if it ends up appealing to me even in the slightest I'll be both surprised and delighted. Plenty of other people, however, are very heavily invested indeed and when an MMO gets made from an IP that people love it doesn't often seem to go down as well as either the developers or the fans might hope or expect. LotRO might be the exception although even that's had its ups and downs, but the commercial and/or artistic history of the rest - SWG, SW:ToR, Warhammer, AoC, STO, DDO, Lego Universe, to name just a few of the better-known - well, it doesn't make pretty reading.

WildStar, being an original property, should at least avoid disparaging comparisons to its source material. Instead it risks the usual fate of would-be mainstream themepark MMO launches of latter years - being largely ignored by most of the audience it would like to attract while at the same time drawing unflattering comparisons with established titles from those who do give it a try. Nevertheless, while WildStar doesn't hold much interest for me, I wouldn't be that surprised to see it making the best showing of these three in 2014, at least until something better comes along. It smacks rather of Rift, a clean, well-designed MMO from a commercially-focused and adept team with a lower megalomania co-efficient than the average MMO development House.

So WildStar's my horse in this three-way race. I'll back it but I don't plan on riding it. Most likely I'll spend much of next year hacking around the same familiar landscapes on the same spavined, slouch-backed old nags or bumbling around Landmark with my eyes on the horizon and the distant promise of EQNext.

Oh come on! Let's not be negative! Perhaps Landmark will surprise us all when its really A Thing. Maybe the climax of GW2's year-long Living Story will blow our socks off and leave us cheering for the next installment. Maybe something none of us has yet heard of will roar in out of left-field and bowl us all over.

Or maybe 2014 will just be The Year Of More Of More Of The Same. Could be worse.

Can You See What It Is Yet? : EQN Landmark

Another day, another Landmark video.

Here's the bullet point rundown:

• Huge, giant world 
• Procedurally generated
• Five environments
• Hot Volcanic (Lavastorm)
• Cool Forest (Qeynos Hills)
• Arid Desert (Ro)
• Colorful Deciduous Forest (Feydark)
• Snowy (Everfrost)

And what, if anything, can we infer from that?

Well, it seems we need the "huge", "giant" world because "there always needs to be something for people to go explore through" and it has to be procedurally generated because if they'd handcrafted it they way they did Everquest and EQ2  "it would just take way too long and people would consume that content long before we could create more of it". Hmmm.

So do we conclude that the "content" of Landmark is territory and that the act of exploring said territory will consume it? Is that consistent with the emphasis previous videos gave to building and creating? Is there any need for a vast world to explore if the main thrust of the game is building structures, which almost by definition tend to remain where you put them?

Consider this:

a) The game is called "Landmark"
b) It's marketed as a game, not a utility
c) The premium pre-release Pack offers as one of the highlights "a 48 hour or more headstart into Open Beta ensuring ... time to find amazing new claims".
d) By the time Landmark officially launches it should include combat, achievements, titles and an economy.

 A pure MMO Construction Set presumably wouldn't need "content" or gameplay at all, so this must be a game first and a construction set only incidentally, unless, like Neverwinter Nights, the Game and Toolset parts come separately, something that hasn't been suggested. Yet.

Not just a game either but one with a competitive element. I'm having trouble not thinking of it as a corporate version of Wurm Online, which is an intriguing, if slightly terrifying image.

Also, wasn't the idea that we could build anything we fancied, not just things that might exist in Norrath? I seem to remember there being something about a SciFi setting and maybe a contemporary one. Did I imagine that, because if not, don't these five environments offer a somewhat limited palette? Or are they purely for the "Only In Norrath" segment that feeds into EQNext?  That would at least explain the constant referring back to pre-existing Everquest zones.

It seems the more they tell us about Landmark, the less clear it becomes what exactly it is, which makes it somewhat difficult to decide whether to spend $20, $60 or $100 or just pass on the whole thing until the finished version arrives for free. I haven't stumped up for any of the Founder's Packs yet but the time for getting down off the fence is fast approaching. John Smedley is now suggesting a mid-late January start for Alpha rather than the end of February.

Oh well, I guess it's only money...

New MMOs for 2014: There Are Some

J3w3l has some trailers for forthcoming attractions up, along with her second take on WildStar. That, along with both her and Keen's enthusiastic responses to the latest EQ Landmark promo (may as well embed it - everyone else has...) got me thinking about what we have to look forward to for 2014 in MMO Land.


Off the top of my head I could think of WildStar, EQLandmark, The Elder Scrolls Online and... well that was it, really. Come on, there must be more than that. Maybe it's my memory failing. That age thing again.

Remembering stuff, though, that's so 20th Century. We have machines to do that for us now. So I googled "mmo 2014 releases".

Top Free MMORPG.net offers Star Citizen (don't care, won't play, won't be out in 2014 anyway), EQNext (care so much it hurts, will play unless dead, don't believe it will be out until the very end of 2014 at the earliest), Titan (yeah, right), PK Project (um, excuse me?), Lineage Eternal:Twilight Resistance (not quite clear what this is but I've successfully managed to avoid the Lineage franchise for the last decade and a half...) and World of Darkness (now you're just being silly).

I won't go through all the rest of their, um, idiosyncratic list, although it did remind me that The Crew, despite being delayed, is due out next summer. Not all that interested in the gameplay on that one but the prospect of being able to take a virtual road trip across the continental United States has a certain appeal. 

Games Radar has a very slick slideshow that includes the usual suspects but throws in some marginally interesting possibilities like the two hyper-realistic South Korean offerings, Bless and Blade and Soul, neither of which appears to have any kind of Western release scheduled.

They also name-check Black Desert, which I was interested in briefly but am no longer and Otherland, in which I was very interested indeed but which I was sure had been cancelled. On checking it appears that, weirdly, the Gamigo website is still up although the latest news refers to the closed beta from over a year ago. I'm pretty sure it's dead.

Other than that the Games Radar list offers a smattering of funded Kickstarter projects like Embers of Caerus, Pathfinder and City of Titans, all of which are nominally interesting but won't see daylight in 2014.

Ten Ton Hammer includes both EQNext and Pathfinder in its Top Six Sandbox MMOs To Watch In 2014, a list which intriguingly includes TESO, which I hadn't realized was supposed to be a sandbox, along with a previous hot tip now fading fast, ArcheAge. Mention of that one reminded me of Trion's other iron in the fire for next year, Trove. They're both games I'm moderately interested to take a look at but I can't say either is stoking any great fires.


Massively has a round-robin of staff picks for next year that doesn't really shed much light on anything other than the predilections of the individuals involved but the paucity of suggestions on offer does serve to back up my own feeling that 2014 is going to be a really thin year for MMOs. Not having played Halo and not having much interest in space-based games, Destiny, one of the few MMOs the Massively crew add to the pile, doesn't press any of my buttons. Neither doesTUG, yet another of the seemingly endless spawn of Kickstarter-funded sandbox titles.

 So back we come around to where we started. I'll try most any MMO for flavor and in our brave new world of open betas, free to play and try-before-you-buy there's no reason not to give any or all of them a run. Curiosity and the potential for getting a blog post out of the experience almost ensures I'll try all of them at some point but I'm not actually looking forward to playing any of them.

I don't even have the same sense of excitement and expectation for EQ Landmark that I had for, say, GW2 or The Secret World back in 2012. I'm interested in in it, sure, but I can't help thinking it looks like work. No, it's EQNext I really want to play.

And that, I think, is the heart of the problem. Everything else is just marking time until EQNext, which probably won't be out until 2015. Next year is looking like another year of more of the same - GW2, EQ2, all the old favorites - unless, as I very much wish it might, one or more of the MMOs on these lacklustre lists manages to pounce on me and sink its fangs in deep.

Failing that, anyone have any other good tips for 2014?

Build Your Own MMO : Landmark, Trove

So. Trove. What the heck is that all about?

Is Trion setting out to steal a march on EQNext Landmark ? Did they look at what SOE were doing and think "Hey! They missed a trick there - it doesn't look enough like Minecraft" ? Maybe someone just saw GW2's Super Adventure Box side-project-that-grew and thought "I could do better than that".

However the seed got planted something weird is growing. It seems the whole MMO genre is melting before our eyes right now. Someone crossed the streams and we're all caught in the feedback.

I was already struggling to understand Landmark although the recent hour-long Livestream did clarify some things. Off-puttingly, unfortunately. Only one race and it's Human? Bleh. Hunting creatures for resources not in until after launch? Pshaw! Most of my questions remain unanswered but still, Landmark starts to look almost conventional compared to Trove, a game which I am not even going to attempt to parse at this stage.

There's clearly a trend developing and I'm not at all clear on how I feel about it. For years  big and small game developers alike churned out quest-driven theme-park WoW clones seemingly by the dozen. There followed a brief and heady rush of games supposedly driven by Dynamic Events. It was frustrating at times, exciting at others but I always felt I at least knew where I was. Seemingly overnight that's all changed.

When a snowball rolls dowhill...

The biggest and almost certainly the most far-reaching development is the sudden willingness of games companies of all sizes to go full-bore into Build Mode. If that just meant a corporate landgrab for the huge audience of would-be world-builders that Notch uncovered that would be one thing; a sideways slide from Theme Park to Sandbox is never more than a swing of the pendulum away for the genre in any case.

It's not just about the building you do inside the MMO, though. The current wave of MMO developers all seem to have undergone some kind of mass conversion to collectivism. Having decided their customers would all rather be building castles than delving in dungeons they've extrapolated from the micro to the macro and decided to contract out the entire job to us. Don't just build stuff in the MMO. Build the whole damn thing!

At one point in the Trove video a Trion dev says "We have no ego". They'll take ideas from anyone. They're not proud. Scott Hartsman pops up to tell us about the "magic" that happens "when developers and players are interacting". Like Terry Michaels and Dave Georgeson over at Sony Towers the Trion Team believes it's never too early to get players involved. Your Game Developer Needs You! Go sign up right now. Oh, if only those ancient Greeks had come up with a letter before Alpha we could get in there even sooner!

So square it's hip

Before the majors jumped this train it was already steaming down the track that Kickstarter built. Let's just hope there's no washed-out bridge waiting somewhere down the line. Ah, but those arguments over the whole crowdfunding concept are well-rehearsed. We're all just waiting now to see how things turn out.

There's a huge difference, though, between pulling out your credit card to chip in on the development costs of an MMO you fancy playing some day and what SOE, Trion and to a lesser extent Perfect World/Cryptic are hoping to persuade you to do for them. When you break it down, a Kickstarter project isn't much more than a gussied-up pre-order. Mark Jacobs isn't asking you pay him a few hundred dollars so you can spend a few hundred hours building art assets for Camelot Unchained in your free time. (Although there were so many options on the proposal I might have missed that tier...)

And this is where we get to the crux of it, for me at least: time.

It's true I'm not sold on the whole "wisdom of crowds" thing. Like Wilhelm I find Dave Georgeson's acknowledgement that "Sometimes we ask questions that we know can only go one way." reassuring. Maybe it's the Everquest in me; I prefer my developers to have Vision, with or without the trademark. It's also true that I'm aware of the potential issues with fair reward and exploitation that could arise from some of these crowd-sourcing systems.

Those aren't the aspects of the current direction of travel that are making me feel increasingly wary and uncertain. No, it's more that I'm by no means sure that where we're heading is somewhere I want to go. A decade and a half back I came on board for an experience that amounted to a fantasy roleplaying game equivalent of Nathan Detroit's oldest established permanent floating crap game. The venue and the house rules might change but somewhere, day or night, you could be sure there'd always be a party LF1M.

Now, I purely love housing in MMOs. I think some form of housing should be in every game. There's little I like better than ending a session by putting down a few trophies, /sitting by a cosy hearth and logging out. I like crafting things for my house, farming mats, being given furniture by grateful NPCs for whom I've done some small service. Carrying a dining table out of a forest may not be high adventure but it certainly is roleplay, and I do still believe these are at heart roleplaying games.

Looking for work? Well, not really...

I'm not even entirely averse to a little tinkering around behind the scenes. I enjoyed EQ2's Dungeon Maker for what it was, which wasn't all that much in the end, and for a while I entertained fantasies of telling a few tales with Neverwinter's Foundry. The reason those fantasies never took form is because of a little epiphany I had a while back: I want to play MMOs not make them.

Building art assets, constructing scenery, writing and plotting scenarios - even with the whizziest, most user-friendly, intuitive tool-set imaginable it takes time. A lot of time. It took me many weeks working many hours a day to complete one Neverwinter Nights scenario. Back in the 1980s it took me almost as long to finish a text adventure using The Quill. These projects were highly engaging, deeply involving and ultimately very satisfying but they were also exhausting and incredibly time-consuming.

The more I think about it, the less I want to repeat that process. I'm in my mid-50s. I no longer see an endless corridor of years receding away from me to an invisible vanishing point. The prospect of spending hundreds of hours working on virtual vanity projects no longer appeals the way it once did. As for being paid for my efforts, as the Player Studio offers to do, a model which, if successful, will no doubt be emulated widely, well I already have one badly-paying job; I don't need another.

None of which is meant to suggest that I'm not interested in dabbling in such things, in short bursts, now and again, as long as it's amusing. I get creative urges. Often. The thing is, I already have an outlet for those: this blog, which eats up enough and sometimes too much of my play time already.

So it's fair to say that I'm wary of the way things seem to be going. There's a push towards open-ended, user-generated content and collaborative development from one side and signs of a pulling away from directed, level-based content on the other. And yes, the recent flurry of schemes to skip over levels to get to the end game is another part of the ongoing dismantlement of the traditional MMO.

Meanwhile, I signed up for the Trove alpha. If you can't beat 'em...